Radient Blog

RIA Intelligence : Tracking International Firms and Internet Advisers on RADiENT

Written by Jasmeet Sodhi | March 16, 2022 at 8:41 AM


RADiENT is a regulatory intelligence platform that enables thorough RIA research, using data extracted from regulatory filings and external sources. It is used by investors, prime brokers, and investor relations teams to derive deeper insights on RIAs. Find more RADiENT use cases here.


RADiENT combines data from Form ADV and multiple SEC filings, enabling users to identify and track high growth private equity and hedge funds, monitor performance and service provider changes.


Users can access historical regulatory filing data for 50K+ advisors and 100K+ investment management firms. Historical Form ADV data on RADiENT dates back to 2012.


What Does RADiENT’s historical data show?


The data from the last 5 years shows that the number of ADV filings have increased progressively from 2017 to 2021. In 2017, RADiENT recorded 35,509 filings and 18,820 unique filers with a total regulatory AUM of $83.5T. By the end of 2021, the total filings had reached 75,232 with 38,388 unique filers.
The following graph shows the Year-on-Year trends of Form ADV unique filers and the total number of filings for each year from 2017 to 2021.

The number of total Form ADV filers on RADiENT has increased progressively since 2017. In the year 2021, more than 38,000 RIAs filed Form ADV, managing an AUM of $81T.



How Have RIAs Grown Over the Years ?


We divide the RIA data on RADiENT into four AUM buckets for easy analysis of RIA growth over the years.
The four buckets are 0-$500M, $500M-$1B, $1B-$500B and $500B+.




The graph shows that the total number of fillings of smaller RIAs (those managing AUM worth less than $500M) have increased on a Y-o-Y basis. The other three AUM buckets saw a spike in the total number of filings till 2019. 2020 and 2021 saw a decline in the number of filings by the RIAs of these categories.


The rise of Internet Investment Advisors


Internet Investment Advisers must provide any investment advice exclusively through an online algorithmic-based program that clients interact with directly. These advisers cannot provide any advice like traditional advisers do, using human interaction.
According to RADiENT data, 30 US registered internet advisers filed Form ADV with AUM>$10K in 2021. The largest internet investment adviser by AUM for the year was a New York-based company called Meta Investment Management Company ( AUM $3.5M).
Users can access the complete list of internet advisers and view their recent Form ADV disclosures on RADiENT!


How Many Foreign Registered Firms Filed Form ADV in 2021?


Data on RADiENT shows that in 2021, 168 firms that are registered outside of the US filed Form ADV. The largest RIA by total registered AUM was an Indian firm- ICICI Prudential Asset Management Co. Ltd. The data shows that the majority of the firms filing the Form ADV were registered in the United Kingdom and Canada.


More About Form ADV



Form ADV covers fields like the form of the organisation, business and other activity information, industry affiliations, control persons and client transactions and disclosure information.


ITEM 11: Disclosure section
The disclosure information section is item 11 on the form, this section focuses on the firm’s disciplinary history and the disciplinary history of the firm’s advisory affiliates. This section includes only yes/no type questions, to help the SEC determine whether to grant the firm’s application for registration or to revoke its registration or to place limitations on their activities as an investment adviser.



Track Advisers Disciplinary and Regulatory Risk with RADiENT


RADiENT uses the data from this section to further simplify due diligence. On the Advisers Tab, users can refer to the ‘Reg Risk’ column that has either green, red or yellow tiles. These tiles depict the level of regulatory risk the firms have disclosed in their fillings.



Green tiles indicate no question was answered “yes”.
The yellow tiles indicate one or more questions, except those relating to felony /misdemeanor charges/convictions, were answered "yes". The red tiles indicate the firm answered “yes” to one or all questions pertaining to being charged with / convicted of a felony/misdemeanor.

Additionally, users can leverage RADiENT’s historical data comparison feature to compare a firm’s filings for any year starting from 2012. This comparison can be easily exported to Excel for further analysis.





To know more about the Form ADV filings on RADiENT, write to us at support@radientanalytics.com